"Sakurajima - Capturing Rare Moments" is a long-term documentary project filmed over a decade, following one of the most active explosive volcanoes on Earth and the people who live alongside it. The project utilised custom-built, 8K resolution film equipment and acquisition workflows designed to operate in extreme volcanic environments - capturing both rare eruptive events and the everyday pros & cons of life under constant geological threat.

I was the DoP (Director of Photography) for this project and it was also my first shot at directing a major project. But I had to work within the basic NHK guidelines, following the character-driven narative. I would much prefer the documentary to focus on the volcano itself, with me behind the camera - as usual - not in front of it. This project presented three major chalenges...

The first was filming in the constant presence of the highly-abrasive and staticly-charged volcanic ash. Even between eruptions the ash would linger in the air. It took a huge toll on the equipment, especially the drone. We had to replace the drone motors every 2~3 months. And this is despite of having to clean all the equipment for hours after each day of filming, so it could be used again the next day...

The second challenge was the unpredictability of the eruptions. At first, we had to keep the cameras recording all the time - hoping to capture it. This would generate huge amount of data (filming at 8K we would fill up the 1TB cards in less than one hour!) and cause extreme wear and tear on the equipment. Luckily, due to my close relationship with the RED Digital Cinema camera company, I was able to reach out to Jarred Land - and he would with his team come up with a "PRE-ROLL" function, where the camera would keep re-recording the last 30 seconds. When eruption happened - we would just press the record button and the camera would keep the previous 30 seconds and just continue to record from then on. This way we just had to make sure to press the record in less than 20 seconds after the beggining of an eruption. We would still have to spend endless hours, day after day, on the location - but at least we have reduced the amount of data we needed to keep. We have still ended up with well over 100 TB (yes - that's TerraBytes) of RAW 8K data to work with in the postproduction...

The final challenge was to capture the footage at night. You can search the internet and easily find amazing pictures of the Sakurajima's night eruptions, with bright lava trails and volcanic lightning. But not everyopne realises that these pictures were achieved by keeping a long exposure (sometimes tens of seconds per picture) to capture these amazing photos. We don't have that luxury when filming moving images. Each second has at minimum 30 frames (normally 60 when filming for NHK) - so that leaves 1/30 of a second to expose each frame. Needles to say - this several hundred times shorter than the still photos. This forced us to use eaxtremely "fast" specialised lenses and advance production and post-production techniques and workflows in order to capture these spectacular events...